


The Enemy Within

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, Pre-film, booker vs camel, cairo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:34:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26406583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: A voice called out behind him in English, “Ride the camel?”“No, thank you,” Booker said.“Really?” Joe elbowed him. “I thought you agreed to have an authentic tourist experience.”“I don’t like camels. They’re ugly, they’re mean and—”Nicky reached for his wallet.OR, shortly before the events of the film, Booker joins Joe and Nicky in Cairo, where he is taught several lessons and comes to a life-changing decision.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 100
Kudos: 450





	The Enemy Within

“So I added some options to the google doc,” Booker said, watching Joe and Nicky move around each other in the kitchen, a familiar, well-choreographed dance, “and I just want to be sure that you both looked at it. Because google docs has that little feature where it says ‘last edit made by’ at the top, and it still says _I_ made the last edit, and I did ask you to put your comments in the column under your name.”

“Hm?” Nicky said, tossing the contents of the wok. “Joe, can you pass me the tamari and the blowtorch, please?”

Joe did, throwing in a kiss for good measure. Booker folded his arms, impatient, as Nicky drizzled tamari around the edges of the wok and then switched on the blowtorch, shooting the flame directly at the ingredients he was stir-frying. Booker waited until the popping and sizzling sounds had died down, and then he tried again.

“Should I have sent a doodle poll? I fucking hate a doodle poll, but I’ll do one next time if that’s more your style. God knows Andy hasn’t—”

“You weren’t hoping for meat, were you?” Nicky interrupted. “Joe and I have decided to become vegetarians.”

“Wait, what?” Booker said, temporarily distracted.

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Back in the old days, we had to cut the head off a chicken if we wanted to eat it, remember?” Joe said, resting his hip against the counter and handing Nicky a spatula. “We don’t really interact with our food anymore. Most people don’t. It changes what consumption means to you. And what with the state of the environment, climate change, we started feeling shitty about living that way—”

“Being an apex predator should come with certain responsibilities, no?” Nicky said.

“So Nicky and I have decided not to eat any living creature that we haven’t looked in the eye and killed ourselves,” Joe concluded. 

“Okay…” Booker wasn’t thrilled by this development. After months apart, he’d been especially looking forward to enjoying Nicky’s cooking again. Maybe he would have to rethink priorities and scrounge up some rural jobs so that Nicky could personally slaughter all their meals. In the meantime, he decided to be a good sport about it. “In Native American culture, they believe that when you eat an animal, you swallow its spirit,” he offered. “And it becomes part of you. Everything it’s ever done, where it’s been, what it’s seen, you carry it with you. Kind of a cool idea, huh?”

Joe and Nicky looked at each other.

“…Sorry, _which_ culture?” Joe said.

“What? I said, Native Am—”

“A specific tribe?” Nicky pressed. The corner of his lip twitched. “Or do they all believe the same thing, in their one big tipi that they all live in?”

“Oh, fuck off,” he groaned. “You know I didn’t mean it like that. The guys we joined up with after the Civil War. The, uh, the Apaches.”

“The _Mescalero_ Apaches,” Joe said severely, then burst out laughing.

“You’re winding me up,” he complained, but couldn’t be too put out about it. Nicky’s stir-fry actually smelled pretty delicious, even if it was just a bunch of vegetables. A stir-fry, though… “Who makes a stir-fry in Cairo?” he wanted to know.

“I assume your presence here means our holiday is coming to an end,” Nicky replied, taking the wok off the heat. “In anticipation of that, I am attempting to clear out the contents of the refrigerator.”

“Maybe I just fancied a trip to Cairo,” he said, for the sake of argument.

“Uh huh,” Joe said flatly.

“I’ve never really _done_ Cairo, you know, taken in the sights.”

He decided not to mention what a welcome sight _they_ were, Joe and Nicky, after nearly a year left to his own devices, knocking around Paris and periodically drinking himself to death, just because he could. The pair of them looked tanned and well-rested, dressed alike in loose linen shirts and nondescript jeans. Nicky’s eyes gleamed even brighter, and Joe’s buzzcut had grown out into a profusion of buoyant curls. They looked, in other words, like people who had made the most of their vacation. Their easy, languid demeanors bespoke the copious amounts of sex they always indulged in off the clock.

“Holiday’s treated you well, huh?” Booker said, raising his voice as the distorted roar of the muezzins’ call to prayer echoed out from dueling minarets, making the apartment shake. Nicky held up a hand to shush him before he could say more, and they waited respectfully for the call to finish. Cairo was _loud._ Booker had felt a little dazed in the taxi from the airport, as car horns bellowed tuneless symphonies amidst avenues of faded nineteenth-century grandeur while donkey carts rattled down dusty lanes lined with colossal Fatimid and Mamluk monuments. Joe and Nicky had taken an apartment overlooking the Khan Al Khalili market; the window offered a panoramic view over the hustle and haggle below.

When the prayer had concluded, he turned to Joe, struck by a sudden thought. “You probably passed through here on the way to Jerusalem, right? Way back when?”

“We did, yeah,” Joe said.

“Must’ve been pretty overwhelming for you.”

“I don’t follow,” Joe said.

“Well, if it was the first big city you ever saw…”

Joe’s eyebrows shot up. “Nicolò,” he said slowly, “Sebastien here seems to think that I was some sort of nomadic goatherd before I went off to fight the infidels.”

“Do you want me to kill him for you?” Nicky offered, beginning to dish up the stir-fry.

“What have I said now?” Booker groaned, edging back a little. Nicky had only killed him twice before, but both times were memorable and filled him with deep shame. He didn’t want to invite an encore.

“Yusuf was a _merchant_ ,” Nicky said. “He was extremely well-traveled when we first encountered each other, more cosmopolitan than I was, certainly. How is it possible that you do not know this?”

“I-I don’t think anyone ever told me,” Booker said, irritated and a little embarrassed. “I would’ve remembered.”

“You never listen, and you never ask,” Nicky said.

That stung. Wordlessly, Booker accepted the plate Nicky handed him and went to sit at the table. He _asked_ , he _listened_ , he knew the story: in 1099, Nicolò had been a Christian priest-turned-knight invader, Yusuf had been a Muslim defender, they’d met at the siege of Jerusalem and killed each other many, many times until they fell in love and lived happily ever after. What more was there to know? They were always telling him that he dwelled too much on the past and should stop brooding over who he had been and what he had lost. By that logic, what did it matter if Joe had herded goats in the desert or traded luxury goods along the Mediterranean? The end result was the same.

Nothing further was said on the subject; Joe and Nicky defrosted after a few minutes. Keen to reingratiate himself with his hosts, Booker praised the stir-fry. It had that distinct smoky flavor he associated with Cantonese food in southeastern China, the vegetables almost grilled and the noodles singed just right. Hence the blowtorch, he realized. “How do you come up with shit like that? Nicky, you’re a genius.”

“The bok choy is a little tough,” Nicky said pensively, catching a piece between his chopsticks and holding it up to the light. “Don’t you think?”

Booker hastened to assure him that it was not, and presumed the earlier matter forgotten.

But the next day Joe had his revenge, in the form of a one-humped camel.

Joe and Nicky insisted on taking him to see the pyramids. Despite all the jobs they had worked in the Middle East over the years, Booker had never really visited any of the landmarks that people traveled specifically to see. Every year he said he would sightsee the next year, he would visit Petra, Wadi Rum, Baalbek, until it became clear that he would spend his inter-mission downtime in the same hotels in front of the same televisions. But now his time had come: he would finally be a tourist. Naturally, any Egyptian sightseeing jaunt entailed a trip to the pyramids, and Booker agreed reluctantly, figuring that Joe and Nicky could at least supply something like native knowledge.

They turned up at his hotel and rousted him out of bed at dawn to line up for the 7am opening. The sky in Giza that morning was untainted, an uninterrupted expanse of pure blue. Not unlike Nicky’s eyes, on the days that Nicky’s eyes were blue.

Booker climbed up a few rows of the Great Pyramid, dipping into the openings between the weathered limestones, as Joe and Nicky stood at the base and snapped pictures on their iPhones to be shown to Andy, for her amusement, then promptly erased from the Cloud. He inched his way back down, and the three of them waited in line to see the Sphinx, Booker battling flies that seemed utterly indifferent to Joe and Nicky beside him. The pair of them were chatting in Arabic, a language he could barely grasp the rudiments of, so he didn’t bother trying to follow their conversation. A cacophony of Scandinavian languages surrounded them, blonde people in hiking boots carrying large backpacks and clutching guidebooks. The three of them stood out in this crowd, especially Joe, who had taken to wearing a backwards ballcap—utterly ridiculous—while Nicky had donned a pair of dark Ray-Bans that made him look mysterious in an old-fashioned movie-star kind of way. Their fellow tourists kept glancing at him, like they wanted to ask for his autograph but couldn’t quite place where they’d seen him before.

At last they got up close to the mythical cat and walked along her perimeter. Joe explained that the pyramids had not actually been built by the slaves of Hollywood tradition, but rather by an organized workforce of Egyptian farmers. Booker stopped paying attention after that. Once he’d had his fill, they headed back to the parking lot to find a taxi. As they approached a cluster of cabs, Booker heard a voice call out behind him in English, “Ride the camel?”

He turned around to see a very old man with burnt-rubber skin pointing to a camel draped in a red carpet and flanked by furry, multicolored puffballs, its lips moving methodically as though it were chewing gum. A little boy stood on the other side of the animal, holding a rope as a rein.

Booker had ridden a camel once before in Galilee, maybe thirty years ago, because Nicky had bet him a hundred dollars that he wouldn’t. It had been an easy bet to win, but then as he dismounted from the beast, it began to urinate with such vigor that the piss had ricocheted off the dirt and all over his jeans. Nicky had laughed so hard that he’d wept, and of course he’d told Joe and Andy all about it, too.

“No, thank you,” Booker said.

“Really?” Joe elbowed him. “I thought you agreed to have an authentic tourist experience.”

“I don’t like camels. They’re ugly, they’re mean and—”

Nicky reached for his wallet.

“I’m not taking a bet. If I ride the camel, I’ll do it ’cause I wanna ride the fucking camel.”

“So ride the fucking camel,” Nicky said.

“I don’t want to.”

One minute later, Booker was telling the old man that he’d changed his mind and would like to ride the camel, please. 

The old man grinned, revealing several missing teeth. He nodded at the boy, who then tapped the camel’s knuckled knee and pulled on the rein, bringing the animal toward the ground. Witnessing the process was like watching a marble zigzag through a maze. First the camel sloped forward, then backward again, until its legs were folded neatly beneath it. Booker grabbed the pommel and swung his right leg over the hump, placing his feet into the stirrups. He was half afraid he might tumble forward as the camel began to stand up, and wouldn’t Joe and Nicky fucking love that. But somehow he managed to cling on, the beast jerking him back and forth until it was completely upright.

At ten feet off the ground, the air seemed cleaner, free from the smog enveloping Cairo. Booker straightened his spine and indulged in a feeling of grandeur. The little boy led the camel along and the three of them hobbled forward, a slow, ungainly dance, his pelvis rotating awkwardly each time they took a step.

Four minutes later they were back at the point where they had started. Joe, Nicky, and the old man were still standing there, all three of them smoking, which was something Joe and Nicky rarely did anymore. Once again the boy tugged the camel’s rein and it began to descend. Booker felt himself falling forward, then backward, then forward again, until the camel was kneeling. He slid off and took an enormous step backward, out of range, brushing pieces of carpet off his jeans. He then turned to the old man and asked, “How much?”

The old man dropped his cigarette into the sand and buried it with his bare toe. “Normally the price is two hundred dollars. But for you”—he exhaled, and the smoke he’d been holding in his throat billowed forth—“because you’re special, it’s one-fifty.”

Booker stared at him for a few seconds, certain he’d misunderstood. “One hundred and fifty _U.S._ dollars?”

“Yes. Down from two hundred.”

He looked around for Joe and Nicky, but they’d wandered off towards the taxi queue. He tried to wave them over, but they were evidently engaged in conversation and paid him no mind.

Furiously, he wiped the sweat from his brow; it was hot enough to char brisket on the sidewalk. Admittedly there was no price sheet to consult, but it seemed impossible that a hundred-foot walk—camel or no fucking camel—could cost that much. Then again, maybe it _was_ the going rate, what did he know? He didn’t want to seem cheap by haggling for it. He suppressed his doubts and took out his wallet, depositing a hundred, a ten and two twenties into the old man’s waiting hand. The old man made a fist around the bills and smiled. “Salaam alaikum. Make sure you come back soon.”

Not a fucking chance.

On the ride back to the apartment, Booker asked Joe and Nicky how much a camel ride around the pyramids normally cost.

Nicky lowered his sunglasses. He always got squeezed into the middle seat because he was the lankiest, even though he was of a height with Joe and Booker and quite broad-shouldered, as Booker was reminded of every time the motion of the car slammed them together.

“Two, three guineas,” Nicky said—approximately eighteen cents. “Why?” he asked innocently, as Booker’s face reddened. “How much did you pay?”

“One hundred and fifty dollars.”

“One hundred and fifty _U.S._ dollars?”

“…Yep.”

“Was it a turbo-powered camel?” Nicky demanded.

“No, but the guy said—”

“Of course the guy said.” Nicky _tske_ d, sliding his sunglasses back up again. “Do you believe everything everyone tells you, Sebastien?”

“I thought it would be impolite to haggle,” Booker defended himself. He could feel the back of his neck starting to heat up.

“This is the Middle East,” Nicky said. As if that explained anything.

Joe had remained oddly silent throughout this exchange; now he made a strangled sort of noise that might have been a cough. “Excuse me,” he said. “Shouldn’t have smoked that cigarette.”

Booker slouched against the door, trying to keep out of range of Nicky’s shoulders, and fumed. He’d been swindled, of course. Why hadn’t Joe and Nicky waited for him? The guy wouldn’t have pulled a stunt like this if they’d stuck around until he paid. Still, he felt like a prize idiot. He was out of his depth in the Middle East—he really needed to buckle down and learn Arabic properly—but it was more than that.

The older he got and the deeper his milieu receded into the past, the more the idiosyncrasies of culture kept him an outsider and left him with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging. Andy always seemed to know everything, and Joe and Nicky were intrepid autodidacts who delved into the minutiae of every culture they encountered. They managed to acquire basic but nuanced knowledge, the stuff that no one really taught you. That an invitation for eight o’clock really meant nine-thirty, for example—in Beirut, Booker once arrived for a dinner meeting with a potential client right on time, only to find the restaurant’s staff was still cleaning up from the night before.

Even back in France, in Europe, in all the places where he spoke the language and blended in, he felt like just as much of an outsider. Yes, he kept up with the technology, he kept up with the football, he endeavored to modernize his principal languages with the latest idioms and erase his accent, but all these exercises felt increasingly hollow. They brought him no real joy. He experienced a fleeting satisfaction when one of his football teams bested one of Joe’s—Nicky only liked the Women’s Cup, he said the female players were proper athletes who took the game seriously, unlike the men, who were always pretending to fall down—and felt a disproportionate, existential despair when one of them lost.

Back at the Giza necropolis, Joe and Nicky—though they were almost a thousand years old—had still spoken wonderingly of the pyramids’ extraordinary shape and impeccable design. Booker had stood in the shadow of the last remaining wonder of the ancient world and felt nothing at all.

He realized Joe and Nicky were both looking at him expectantly.

“What?” he said.

“One hundred and fifty dollars,” Joe said, “is the price of the camel itself.”

Booker stared at him, his shoulder colliding with Nicky’s as the taxi driver took a sharp corner. _Make sure you come back soon_ , the old man had told him. “So what you’re saying is, technically, I own the camel.”

“Technically, yes,” Joe said.

“Make sure you declare it at customs,” Nicky added, and the pair of them cracked up.

“You motherfuckers!” he groaned, catching on at last. “You set me up, didn’t you?”

“We did,” Joe confirmed, the corners of his eyes crinkled with mirth. “Consider it my revenge.”

“Revenge? Revenge for _what_ , exactly?”

Joe’s face turned somber. “Despite all our years together, you made a false assumption about my origins, because, as Nicolò correctly pointed out last night, you rarely ask us anything about ourselves or show the slightest interest in our lives. I would mind less if you simply thought us boring,” Joe went on, “but coming to your own conclusions, of the most narrow-minded, parochial—”

“I said I was sorry!” Booker protested. “Listen, Joe, I never meant to suggest you were some kind of, I dunno, uncivilized herdsman who’d never seen a city before—”

“It’s ignorant to assume that we all existed as the Bedouins do, but their way of life deserves respect as well,” Joe said sternly. “You think there’s anything easy about herding goats and camels? Nicky and I gave it a try in the thirteenth century—”

“And we were shit at it,” Nicky said.

“Total shit.”

“Our flocks hated us.”

“Oh, they fucking _despised_ us, me especially. Nicolò did slightly better with them—Nico, do you remember how you had to sing to that nanny goat before she’d consent to being milked?”

“Nicky sang to goats?” Booker said, a little charmed. “Did he really?”

“It was the highlight of my day,” Joe said sincerely.

Nicky snorted. “At first I christened her Gioia, but she was the least joyful creature I have ever encountered. In the end, I was forced to rechristen her Ya Khara, which is Arabic for—”

“—You Shit,” Joe finished.

Booker laughed. He thought the goat probably knew what she was about, though: Nicky really was a superb singer. Because of how beautiful he was, one could be forgiven for assuming that he sang like a choirboy. But he didn’t—Christ, no. He sang like a rock n roll star. Mick Jagger or somebody. Better. In the sixties and seventies, A&R men kept offering him record deals. He couldn’t sing in public anymore, though, not when anyone could pull out an iPhone and upload it to YouTube. 

“I miss hearing you sing,” Booker admitted.

Nicky smiled slightly, and Joe beamed like the sun.

They went through several bottles of wine at dinner that night. Joe and Nicky became loose and expansive; Booker got drunk. The business with the camel now struck him as terribly funny. He wondered what the old man would say if he actually went back to claim his property.

Eventually they migrated from the table to sprawl on the floor. The sight of Joe and Nicky, all intertwined limbs and red-stained lips, made him misty-eyed. He drank directly from the bottle, watching Joe drape himself over Nicky’s chest to kiss him, Nicky’s hand coming up to card through his hair. It happened like this sometimes, the pair of them getting so engrossed in each other that they forgot Booker’s presence entirely, their caresses turning overtly sexual. But then Joe lifted his head and said, “We were planning to go to Ankara, day after tomorrow. We have an Air BnB waiting. You should come with us.”

“Unless you really did come to talk business, in which case our plans can change,” Nicky said. He pushed himself up on an elbow, his gaze remarkably clear-eyed and sober. “ _Have_ you found a job for us?”

“I have a few leads—which you would already know about if you’d looked at the google doc I emailed last week,” Booker replied, a little waspishly. “But nothing… definite… yet.”

“We will all read your document together, tomorrow,” Nicky assured him, in a tone that made Booker doubt very much that Nicky grasped the concept of a google doc. “I’m sorry, Sebastien. Yusuf and I are not very organized people on holiday, and I keep forgetting which of the email addresses I’m supposed to be using…”

“Yahoo,” Joe said.

“Gmail,” Booker corrected.

“Gmail,” Nicky repeated. “Are they promising, your leads? Do you think Andy will…” He trailed off, and Booker was silent, too, scratching at his short beard.

Andy had been in terrible spirits when they’d parted company last year, threatening retirement, threatening to disappear, threatening to disappear so thoroughly that none of them would ever find her again, not even if they walked the earth for millennia. _Though I expect you’d give up after fifty years or so_ , she’d said nastily, _if the past is anything to go by._

“It would have to be an isolated opportunity, no long-term commitments,” Joe said, breaking the uneasy reverie. “Morally unimpeachable, of course, and nothing political.”

“Europe and North America are probably out of the question,” Nicky said.

“Tomorrow,” Booker insisted, dismayed by how sober and alert the pair of them had become. “We’ll go through the doc tomorrow, okay?”

“As you wish,” Nicky agreed, beckoning Joe to lie back against his chest.

But the mood had darkened; Booker could sense that, drunk as he was. “I should—bed,” he said awkwardly. “I’m gonna head back to the hotel—”

“It’s late, you should stay,” Nicky interrupted.

He mumbled something about not wanting to intrude.

“Intrude? Bullshit. The sofa pulls out, I’ll make it up for you,” Joe said, kissing Nicky’s cheek before levering himself up.

They puttered around hospitably for a few minutes, making sure he had a toothbrush, offering an extra pillow, all the little amenities that fell by the wayside when they were on a job. He found it comforting—he lived like a destitute university student in Paris, alone in his garret, though he had piles of money at his disposal—but also irritating. He was suspicious of kind gestures, any surface that might be scratched to reveal pity lurking beneath.

“Think about Ankara,” Joe reminded him, before he and Nicky retired to the bedroom. “It’s a nice house we’ve rented, there’s plenty of space.”

“I…” His tongue felt heavy in his mouth.

“You can bring your camel,” Nicky said.

He groaned.

“We missed you like hell,” Nicky said, switching to English. The persistence of his accent in that language always cheered Booker immensely.

“Like hell?” he said, cracking a smile. “Really?”

“Truly and most acutely.” Nicky’s answering smile was warm and satisfied; he’d elicited the desired reaction.

How well they knew him.

“I’ll sleep on it,” Booker managed.

They bade him goodnight and closed the door behind them.

He lay awake in the dark, listening to the soft murmur of their voices, trying to hold onto Joe’s generosity and Nicky’s smile. But it felt like sand running through his fingers—brilliant red sand from the Egyptian desert, scorching and full of memory. Any minute now the quality of the sounds emanating from the bedroom would change, and all the warmth and goodwill would slip away from him. Resentment would creep back in; he would feel more alone than ever.

It began with a thud—the unmistakable collision of a headboard against a wall. Then Joe’s laugh rang out, loud and unrestrained, and Booker braced himself.

“It would be easier”—Nicky, in Italian—“if you would just get on your hands and knees for me.”

“But then I can’t watch.” Joe.

Nicky’s voice, too low to make out; Joe laughed again.

Christ almighty, Booker thought. 

Nicky: “You can watch next time.”

Booker rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling.

Joe, breathless and a little giddy: “Fuck.”

Every soundtrack had a corresponding visual, and there was a certain aesthetic pleasure in picturing it. He knew that Nicky’s shoulders were broad and strong, that they tapered to a slim waist that fit neatly in Joe’s hands. He knew how powerfully the muscles of Joe’s back, his buttocks, flexed when he was inside of Nicky. If Joe was on his hands and knees, then Nicky would be folded over his back, kissing along the knobs of his spine, and sooner or later Joe would start telling Nicky how much he loved him.

“I love you,” Joe said. “Do that again.”

Not even their infinite variety could surprise him at this point.

Joe again, a few minutes later: “Touch me?”

Nicky: “Not yet.”

A frustrated moan from Joe.

Nicky: “I want to keep you like this, oh, just a little bit longer.” 

Booker had disciplined himself not to respond to the sights and sounds of their lovemaking: he never got more than half-hard, never touched himself. They had made it clear that they didn’t mind if he did, as long as he didn’t impose himself, but he’d learnt that he was better off finding other companionship for the night, even if he had to pay for it. Fluttering like a pathetic little moth at the periphery of Joe and Nicky’s light, spiraling around their halo only to plummet down fast and hard—that only made everything worse.

“Turn over.” Nicky.

A creak of mattress springs, and Joe: “My love, my love. You make me a happy man.”

Happiness was like energy, Booker thought. It couldn’t be created or destroyed; it could only be displaced. Shifted from one body to another. Maybe the world was fucked up because Joe and Nicky had too much and there wasn’t enough left to go around. 

Grunting little gasps. Joe: “Tell me it’s good for you. Tell me—”

“Lower your voice.” 

“Tell me what it feels like.”

“My love, you already know…”

“Tell me anyway.” Joe, imploring. “Tell me again. I know all the secret places where you hide your words, Nicolò, and I will suck them out through your cock if I have to.” 

“It feels like fucking you, Yusuf.” Nicky’s voice was ragged and full of laughter. “Obviously it is nothing short of sublime.” 

“Nicolò—…”

The unselfconscious rapture in their voices _hurt_ , physically hurt him. Something deep within his chest splintered apart like ice hitting rock, breaking into a thousand knives. He despised the responsibility of being an ancient, unfathomable thing, neither human nor inhuman, who served the secret, fluttering flames of destiny. He was so angry that he wanted to bury the sharp pieces of his anger in Joe and Nicky, in Andy, and most of all in himself. Put an end to it.

Booker sat up and reached for his phone. He browsed through his email, finding the carefully worded inquiry from James Copley. It couldn’t hurt to hear the man out, he thought. If Copley really had figured them out, well—… All things came to an end, sooner or later. Even them. The things they had seen, the things they had done. Their impossibly long memories were an abomination. Too much remembering, not nearly enough forgetting, only one certainty: 

Truth fades with no eyes or ears to carry it into the future.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! As always, I love to hear from you <3


End file.
